Drawing, Drawing, Drawing

This morning I read on the @diebenkornfoundation Instagram account that Richard Diebenkorn worked only on paper for two years, 1981-2, before returning to painting on canvas.  I might be wrong about this, but the implication is that this was a transition time for Diebenkorn, who went on to dedicate the final years of his career with the great Ocean Park paintings, a series of paintings that led from one to another if there ever was one.  I think that Philip Guston went through a similar period where he did only drawings prior to his last phase of Klu Klux Klansmen and smoking cigars.  Focusing upon drawing for a while can be a fruitful method to uncover next steps.

Three drawings that I did at Sheep Hill in Williamstown, MA one or a few summers ago.  7x14 inches.  Charcoal on paper.

Emptying The Studio

Years ago I setup a studio in a second floor bedroom, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  I covered the carpet with drop cloths to keep it clean, but now we are replacing all the carpet because it's old and has noticeable wear and tear elsewhere on the same floor.  So I've been taking apart the bedroom studio (as well as the other rooms) for the new carpet installation.  This painful and traumatic emptying naturally leads me to wonder if it's time to re-think not just the studio layout, but everything about what happens there.  Imagine finding a subject that one could keep painting and re-inventing, one painting leading to the next painting.  This happened to Philip Guston when he started doing his crazy cartoonish paintings.  Jean Renoir writes about his father: "He told me one day that he regretted not having painted the same picture--he meant the same subject--all his life.  In that way, he would have been able to devote himself entirely to what constituted 'creation' in painting: the relations between form and color."  Giorgio Morandi is an example of doing this.  In any case, I'm just thinking, but not too hard.

The accompanying painting is not the bedroom studio, but another studio space that I share with two other artists.   I painted it four years ago in January.  16 x 20 oil on panel.

If Only They Kept Coming

The seventh Red Hook, an 8x10 oil on panel.

I've just finished reading Night Studio, a memoir, written by Musa Mayer, the daughter of the painter Philip Guston.  One enviable takeaway for me is the constant and exciting creativity that came upon Philip Guston in the last twelve years of his life.  No matter what you may think of his paintings and drawings from this period, he kept finding and inventing new visual ideas pulled from his own experience.  It's as if he didn't know they were there, but when he started tapping the source, they kept coming and coming.

A Pond and A Big Change

Early this morning I went to the local pond (actually there are two ponds, and this is the smaller of the two), and painted for an hour.  The result is this 9x12 oil on panel.

In an unrelated topic, other than painting, I've been reading books by and about the painter Philip Guston.  I've always wondered about his change from abstraction to figurative work, and not just any figurative work, but cartoony, clumsy-like, mythic depictions of light bulbs, Klansmen, pyramids, shoes, one-eyed heads, and so on.  When Richard Diebenkorn switched from abstraction to figurative work, and then back again, the transitions were gradual and consistent.

Guston's changed content, though painted similarly to his abstract handling of paint, occupied the last ten years of his life.  Guston unfortunately died at the relatively young age of 67.  His abstract work seems angst driven, linked in my mind to the popular existentialist sensibility of the time.  However, he seems to have reached a point where abstraction was empty for him, but the angst was always there, and led him to rediscover what he really wanted to do as a painter.  His changeover wasn't well received.  But today he seems to be highly regarded for the change and the work of his last ten years.